Unexpectedly, Alexieva smiled, the expression transforming her rather grim features. “Thanks. I spent about three years in the massif, mapping.” Her face clouded again. “I didn’t get very far, though.”
“Grant money run out?” Heikki asked, not quite idly, and Alexieva shook her head.
“No, Lo-Moth ended the project. They were really only interested in mapping the edges of the massif— still are, for that matter. God knows, I’ve tried to get them to sponsor a trip to the center! But they say their flights don’t cross the core, so there’s no point in spending money on a really detailed survey.”
“That sounds damn shortsighted of them,” Djuro said.
Alexieva shrugged. “They’ve been pretty reluctant to spend money, ever since the home office changed management.”
“Home office?” Heikki said. “Do you mean Tremoth, or the higher-ups at Lo-Moth?”
Alexieva looked down at her console as though she regretted having said even that much. “Tremoth, I guess. I don’t really know—I only worked for them the once.”
Heikki did not pursue the point, saying instead, “You’d think somebody would put up the money.”
Alexieva shrugged again, the same sullen, one-shouldered movement Heikki had seen before. “Who’s got it to spend?” She fingered her keyboard. “I’m switching maps.”
Which was an effective end to the conversation, Heikki thought. She said nothing, however, merely noting the shift in her own records, and settled back in her chair to wait for the next course correction. The Asilas, a silver band almost two fingers wide, wound past in the tank, seeming to curve in time to the rhythmic drone of the engines. There was a flurry of movement on her board as they passed the Falls, looking from the air like a plume of smoke, and the jumper banked slightly, following the river’s northeasterly curve. Heikki checked her calculations again, matching her course with the latac’s last three position readings. They would intercept the first of those in a little more than two hours.
She sighed then, stretching, and pushed herself up out of her chair.
“Keep an eye on things, Sten,” she said, and Djuro nodded. Satisfied, Heikki turned forward, pulling herself up the short ladder into the pilot’s bubble.
Nkosi had the controls, and sat slumped in his chair, hands loose on the steering yoke, his eyes seemingly fixed on nothing at all. Sebasten-Januarias, in the left-hand seat, had his head turned toward the side of the bubble, but the direction of his gaze was hidden by his dark goggles. Iadara’s sky curved overhead, its brassy blue darkened by altitude, touched here and there by thin wisps of cloud. The trees of the massif formed a dense and dark green floor beyond the jumper’s nose, looking from the air like a coarsely knotted carpet. A lake flashed like a beacon as the sun caught it, and then disappeared again as the jumper slid forward. Heikki blinked, blinded as much by the lush beauty of the scene as by the brilliant sun, then cleared her throat.
“How’s it going?” she asked, as much to let the pilots know she was there as to hear an answer to her question.
Sebasten-Januarias turned toward her quickly, then looked away again without answering. Nkosi said, without turning his head, “Not badly at all. I do not like the look of those, however.”
He nodded toward the southeast, where a line of clouds showed like mountains on the horizon. Heikki leaned forward against the back of his chair, squinting past his shoulder at the distant shapes.
“What do you think, Jan?” she asked, after a moment.
The younger man shrugged, the goggles effectively hiding any changes of expression. “It’s hard to tell. We don’t usually get rain in the afternoon in the massif, not like you get around Lowlands.”
“Is Station Green saying anything?” Heikki asked, and was not surprised when Sebasten-Januarias shook his head.
“Not yet.”
“If we have to fly through them,” Nkosi said, delicately stressing the word “if,” “it will make it hard to hold a low altitude search. Of course, we can always work through the clouds.”
I know that, Heikki thought, scowling. She realized she was tapping the back of Nkosi’s chair, and stilled her fingers with an effort. “Sten,” she said, on the general frequency, “I know you’re tapping into Weather Station Green, but I want you to see if you can pick up Station Red Six as well. There’s bit of cloud in the southeast I want to keep an eye on.”
“No problem,” Djuro answered promptly.
Heikki stayed in the bubble for a few moments longer, lulled by the sunlight and the steady drone of the engines. The ground, darker and less defined than its image in the tank, slid past almost imperceptibly, without many breaks in the vegetation by which she could gauge their progress. To the southeast, the clouds hung steady on the horizon, while the occasional thread of cloud whipped past overhead, borne on the high air currents.
“Heikki?” Djuro’s voice in the headpiece woke her from her daze. “I’m monitoring Station Red Six like you asked. They’re showing a line of rain, all right, which they predict will pass us to the south.”
“Good enough,” Heikki said, and was aware of Sebasten-Januarias’s slow stare. He would have the right to say he told me so, she conceded silently, but to her surprise, the younger man said instead, “About how much longer till we turn onto the latac’s course?”
Heikki glanced at the chronometer set into the control board. “About another hour,” she said, and pushed herself away from Nkosi’s chair. “We’ll let you know, don’t worry. Yell if you need anything, Jock.”
“I will do that,” Nkosi said, tranquilly, not taking his eyes from the distant horizon. Heikki, satisfied, slid back down the ladder into the bay, and reseated herself behind her console.
The last hour passed excruciatingly slowly, until Heikki found herself rerunning tests that had been redundant the first time. At last the flashing light that marked their position steadied into an amber circle, and a warning tone sounded in her ear. She touched the frequency selector, tuning her microphone to the general channel, and said, “Time, Jock.”
“I see it,” Nkosi answered. “Coming up on it—now.” The jumper banked lazily, the image in the tank flickering briefly before the machinery adjusted to the new angle. “We are now on the new heading, flying by your wire, Heikki.”
“You can start the descent to the search altitude whenever you’re ready,” Heikki said, and felt the jumper tilt forward slightly even before Nkosi acknowledged her order. She bent over her console, slaving the sensor array directly to her console, following the craft’s progress on her line map as well as in the tank.
“We’re coming up on the last reported position,” Alexieva announced, and an instant later, Nkosi said, “We are steady at optimum search, Heikki. Cross winds are minimal.”
“I confirm that,” Djuro said.
His instruments were more sophisticated than the pilot’s. Heikki nodded to herself, and took a last look at the array of lights covering her board. “Start scanning,” she said aloud. “Full array. Alexieva, let me know if we deviate from the projected course. Take visual, Sten.”
“We’re right on the line,” the surveyor answered.
“Scanners are on,” Djuro announced. “And we’re recording. I have the sight display.”
Heikki did not bother to answer, watching her board flip from the array of green to the spectrum of brighter colors that displayed the sensors’ readings of the terrain below. From this height, they could cover about a kilometer of ground with better than eighty-five percent accuracy; readings on the fringes of the web could extend almost three kilometers from the source, and occasionally as far as five, but with sharply decreasing accuracy. She frowned a little, studying the familiar pattern, spikes of blues and greens and almost-invisible purples, and adjusted her controls to sharpen the focus. It was a typical pattern, changed only slightly by local conditions, the fleshy leaves and trunks and the loam-covered forest floor providing a good contrast for any metal readings. And metal there would be, if—when— they found the latac: even if the craft had landed deliberately, retracting its enormous envelope, there was still the metal-ribbed gondola to betray the site to the probing beams. And if it had not, if it really had crashed, there would be strips of reflecting foil from the envelope to guide them in. Delicately, she played her controls, hunting along the narrow bandwidth that would show metal, fine tuning the machines so that even the fringes of the web would work at optimum resolution. In the tank, the forest floor crept by undisturbed.